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Updated: September 13, 2025
Real scholars know what Mordvinian divine names mean. They do not know what many Greek divine names mean as Hera, Artemis, Apollo, Athene; there is even much dispute about Demeter. No anthropologist, I hope, is denying that Nature-myths and Nature-gods exist.
The anthropologist who chooses to conduct special investigations of freaks can find no more entertaining field than that of the remarkable freaks of the brain, shown in the cases of some astonishing performers whose intelligence and mental capacity in other ways has been negligible.
The anthropologist, however, is not, as such, concerned with the practical employment to which his discoveries are put. At most, he may, on the strength of a conviction that truth is mighty and will prevail for human good, invite practical men to study his facts and generalizations in the hope that, by knowing mankind better, they may come to appreciate and serve it better.
He had some reputation as a criminal anthropologist and had formerly been well known as a comparative anatomist, but when I made his acquaintance he seemed to be occupied chiefly in making endless additions to the specimens in his private museum. This collection I could never quite understand.
In a very interesting paper of A.F. Chamberlain, on "The Thunder-Bird among the Algonquins," in the "American Anthropologist," January, 1890, reference is made to the belief in this being among the Passamaquoddy Indians. On my recent visit to Calais I obtained from Peter Selmore a story of the origin of the Thunder-Bird, which is different from any mentioned by Leland.
Each anthropologist may have the most accurate knowledge of the external characteristics of men; but the important matter consists in finding a characteristic which will serve as a basis for classification: that is to say, a characteristic on which it will be possible to group numerous characteristics in the order of similitude.
Policy, however, including bad policy, does not come within the official cognizance of the anthropologist. Yet it is legitimate for him to hope that, just as for many years already physiological science has indirectly subserved the art of medicine, so anthropological science may indirectly, though none the less effectively, subserve an art of political and religious healing in the days to come.
There was no anthropologist aboard to study the semibarbaric civilization of the natives; there was no biologist to study the alien flora and fauna. The closest thing the commander had to physicists were engineers who could take care of the ship itself specialist technicians, nothing more.
Even in its modern external forms, Shinto is sufficiently complex to task the united powers of the historian, philologist, and anthropologist, merely to trace out the multitudinous lines of its evolution, and to determine the sources of its various elements: primeval polytheisms and fetishisms, traditions of dubious origin, philosophical concepts from China, Korea, and elsewhere all mingled with Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism.
The Mohammedan population, being of very heterogeneous ethnic composition, and having adopted a culture of foreign origin, which may be better studied in other regions of the earth where the Malay type and culture is more truly indigenous, seems to us to be of secondary interest to the anthropologist as compared with the less cultured pagan tribes.
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